ADDRESSING over 2,000 conservative lawyers and friends at a banquet in central Washington, DC, last week, Neil Gorsuch was in jocular form. “If you’re going to have a meeting of a secret organisation, maybe don’t have it in the middle of Union Station!” quipped the newest Supreme Court judge.

The reason many worry about the Federalist Society, the legal organisation whose annual bunfight Justice Gorsuch was addressing, is not because it is shadowy, but because its influence is vast, brazen and part of a wider politicising of the last branch of American democracy to succumb to partisanship. His speech suggested those worries are if anything underplayed.

Founded in the early 1980s, as a riposte to the legal profession’s liberal mainstream, the Federalist Society has had a hand in the past three Republican Supreme Court appointments—starting with its frosty response to George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers and promotion of Samuel Alito in her place. Yet its role in Mr Gorsuch’s elevation is much greater.
As the youngest conservative justice, he [Gorsuch] is the first to have been a beneficiary of its now-ubiquitous legal networks throughout his career.

The prospect of more ideological and active conservative judges is not intrinsically bad. The federal courts look stronger for including a range of legal philosophies. The problem is that conservatives are not striving for balance, but conquest. That is the logic of Mr Gorsuch’s divisive rhetoric.

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All of which will legally set-back American law (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) in conservative mold. (Or "mould" if one likes.)

There is only one contravening force, and it seems to be awakening. It the Dem left-of-center philosophy. With an accent more on "philosophy" than "left". Which is goodness. Howzzat.

The political philosophies in America is not as hardened into party-camps as is the case in Europe. Americans are known to traverse the political divide when voting (from Left-to-Right and Right-to-Left.)

Which is what happened in the illegitimate last PotUS election. Despite the upsurge of the far-Right in support of our illicit president, the Hillary managed to win the popular-vote. Which was taken away from her by the hideously non-democratic Electoral College ...

It's possible Trump might have won the popular vote if he had been focusing on that; instead he was putting more focus on key states so he could be able to actually win the race.
Because of the way districting works, trying to win over supporters in the more populous states would have been futile, since the majorities in those states are solidly Blue and he would not have been able to win over any electors (winner take all in each state).

The flipside of this is that Trump got a lot less financial donations than usual from wealthy donors in Blue states who normally give to the Republican candidate running for President. (The Trump campaign spent $398 million total compared to the previous Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney's campaign, which spent a little over $1 billion)

The prospect of more ideological and active conservative judges is not intrinsically bad. The federal courts look stronger for including a range of legal philosophies. The problem is that conservatives are not striving for balance, but conquest.

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Oh, do you suppose it's different on the other side? To claim conservative judges are the ones striving for conquest is a clear case of PROJECTION.
(projection is a term in psychology which means you're blaming the other side for faults which are far worse in your side, to thereby deflect your own inadequacies away from yourself, instead projecting them onto someone else, as a defense mechanism)

The flipside of this is that Trump got a lot less financial donations than usual from wealthy donors in Blue states who normally give to the Republican candidate running for President. (The Trump campaign spent $398 million total compared to the previous Republican Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney's campaign, which spent a little over $1 billion)

It's possible Trump might have won the popular vote if he had been focusing on that; instead he was putting more focus on key states so he could be able to actually win the race.

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Only in America is this possible.

The US is the ONLY DEVELOPED NATION on earth that has an Electoral College deciding the outcome of its political National Executive.

Why are we NOT asking the question, "Whyzzat"? Given the aberration it has caused TWICE - both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton won the majority but lost in the Electoral College.

The answer should be obvious ... the popular-vote is the only means in a real-democracy to elect political representatives of all constituencies, both state and national. It must be unaffected by either voting aberrations of the Electoral College or state-level gerrymandering ...

The US is the ONLY DEVELOPED NATION on earth that has an Electoral College deciding the outcome of its political National Executive.

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There are good reasons for that system. You shouldn't mess with things that could end up having unintended repercussions you didn't anticipate.
The question is, is there some way to modify that system to allow a multi-party system while still retaining the underlying concept of it. I mean, keep the winner-take-all system in each state, but make it not function as a winner-take-all system overall. Sorry, it's very late and I'm not able to explain myself the most clearly.
Anyway, we're not going to turn this into a debate over the electoral college here.

Anyway, we're not going to turn this into a debate over the electoral college here.

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Why not? You are pleading to maintain a system that is anti-democratic. The very concept of "democracy" is based upon a solid-foundation of the popular-vote. It's taken a long time to come, after 2000 years of monarchies and emperors.

And there is a damn fine reason: Because under previous Sovereign Heads of Government, families decided the destiny of nations. Which is EXACTLY where we are today in the US - because we allow a rat-pack of very, very rich people influence our vote in an election. And when it comes to the presidency, the Electoral College misappropriates the vote undemocratically.

It's their fault because they CAN MANIPULATE elections, and our fault for allowing them to do so by "selling candidates" as if they were a detergent that "washed whiter than white". (We actually believe the bullshat!)

By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic fairness of awarding the nation’s highest office on the same basis as every other elected office — to the person who gets the most votes.

And so for the second time in 16 years, the candidate who lost the popular vote has won the presidency. Unlike 2000, it wasn’t even close. Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1 percent of the electorate. That’s a wider margin than 10 winning candidates enjoyed and the biggest deficit for an incoming president since the 19th century.

living symbol of America’s original sin. When slavery was the law of the land, a direct popular vote would have disadvantaged the Southern states, with their large disenfranchised populations. Counting those men and women as three-fifths of a white person, as the Constitution originally did, gave the slave states more electoral votes.

Today the college, which allocates electors based on each state’s representation in Congress, tips the scales in favor of smaller states; a Wyoming resident’s vote counts 3.6 times as much as a Californian’s.And because almost all states use a winner-take-all system, the election ends up being fought in just a dozen or so “battleground” states, leaving tens of millions of Americans on the sidelines.